Blog post from Gavin

Gautam and I were on the late watch again last night, 10pm to 2am.  We had about 24 hours of great wind and great progress, but it had left us, and all day today the wind was maddeningly light again.  We'd been sailing, but slowly.  Finally when the shift changed the wind was light enough that it was easy to decide to motor for a while.  So with batteries charging, autopilot and radar readily available, Gautam and I were passing time on watch without a whole lot to do.  After about half an hour we had the incident -- the engine, which had been humming along steadily, dropped in tone about an octave and started running rough.  Well, one of Phil's standing rules is that if anything out of the ordinary happens with the engine, we should wake him immediately which we did.  I can imagine that's one of the more unpleasant pieces of news to wake up to, and we were loathe to be the bearers of it.  So we kill the engine, and Phil tears apart the quarter berths which give access to the engine and starts the diagnoses process-a little midnight engine maintenance.  Just another fact of life on the water.  We operate 24 hours a day, and problems can occur any time, it's just one of those things that can happen any time and they need to be looked at, even if it's a time when most sane people would be asleep.  After more than an hour of this, he concludes we must have picked up something around the propeller blades.  It's always a risk when motoring.  The ocean is full of trash, and we pass it constantly.  Some things like floating ropes, fishing lines or pieces of kelp can easily get caught up in the propeller, causing all sorts of problems.  It seems our luck at avoiding all the flotsam and jetsam of the sea had run out.  The only way to resolve it would be to have someone dive under the boat, but that would have to wait until daylight.  The only catch with that is we're far from the  bathtub-warm, sapphire blue tropical waters we once joyfully dove into.  We're at around the same latitude as San Francisco now, with all the ocean warmth you'd expect from our belovedly frosty coastline.  Volunteers are going to be hard to find.

Thankfully, the wind had picked up to the point we could finish the shift sailing, and make decent progress out of it as well.  Another note is that night the sky was brilliantly clear; the moon doesn't rise until early the next morning, so we were left without interrupting lights.  While steering the boat by hand during the engine troubleshooting process, I had some amazing views of the starry night sky and I saw some amazing shooting stars.

Now the big secret that I tell everyone is that shooting stars are not all that uncommon.  In fact if you pick any reasonably dark spot not far from city lights, on any average night, and watch the sky you're bound to see a few.  On average, I normally see one every 15 minutes or so, and that's only watching a small-ish part of the sky.  I live to watch shooting stars and I make it a point to take a bit of time to spot some often.  However, I saw four that night I would call whoppers; they where some of the best and brightest I've ever seen, so that's saying a lot.  Two in particular were amazing:  one that traced a line like an ink pen, and the entire trail stayed lit for a brief moment before winking out all at once. I'd never seen one quite like that before; the other streaked across a long section of sky, and ended with a bright flash, almost like a firework.

The next morning was spent trying to convince each other to be the one to dive for the prop.  After much, ahem, good natured and confidence inspiring encouragement, Jared finally proved to be the bravest of the lot and volunteered; Gautam prepared as his backup.  He plunged into the fridgid water, and reported it as being "not bad" though I could tell that was an optimistic report at best.  Interestingly enough, somewhere in the hour and a half it took Phil and Jared to confirm, in the engine compartment, that there was a problem, and the time Jared dove down and checked, it must had freed itself, since he reported nothing out of the ordinary.  Checking again from above confirmed that it seemed to be operating nominally now.

With the relief of that problem out of the way, now it was time to have some fun. Gautam decides he's not going to let Jared have all the fun, and with harness and line attached does a nice swan dive off the back of the boat.  This throws down the gauntlet to Phil, who wanting nothing to do with going in the water. He is razzed until he goes in, too. He, of course, is very, um, vocal in his appreciation to Gautam about being put in this bind.  With almost everyone jumping in, the buck then passes to me.  I really, really didn't want to go jumping in. I can do plenty of that kind of thing in the bay if so inclined, or better yet wait until November and then hose myself off at night or something, either of those would accurately produce the pleasure of diving in that water -- which, I finally did.  Actually, it wasn't terrible. In fact, it was a whole lot of fun.  You see I don't think anyone chooses to go on a trip like this who is overly concerned about comfort.  Given that in a long ocean crossing, it's easy to get caught up in the routine of running the boat -- sailing, cleaning, cooking, eating, trying to catch sleep in the moments that remain -- it's important to take time and break up the routine. So we'll give up lots of comfort just for fun.  It ended up being great entertainment for the morning, and we're back on our way, getting a little closer to home each day.